To the right of the door stood the little glass-fronted cabinet made for her in the Vyne workshop to hold her collection of Goss china. On the top of the Victorian wardrobe sat the two early-Victorian dolls, a boy and a girl with china faces, dressed in heavy, dark-coloured clothes. The Jacobean chest-of-drawers was a twin to the one in the Oak Room; several handles had been off it for a long time; and on the wall behind her, tilted forward at an angle, hung a long, very narrow cheval glass; there was one exactly like it in her mother’s bedroom.
Phyllis loved her room, as indeed she did every room at Vyne. She could have identified any one of them if led into it blindfold by its individual smell. The ‘Room’ smelt of beer and coco-nut matting, the still-room of hot cakes and scones, the schoolroom was a blend of Mike, Lady, ink and Fräulein’s cough drops. Her father’s study smelt of tobacco, Harris tweed and Russian leather; her mother’s boudoir of violets and sealing-wax. The drawing-room had the most distinctive smell of all and the hardest to define—it seemed to be composed of spices, potpourri, beeswax and the past. The combined essence of all these individual scents which made the peculiar fragrance belonging to Vyne was one of the first things one noticed on returning there from London, and most of all at Easter.
They would drive up through the park from the station, mounting gradually all the time, and Sir Thomas would remark that the grass had not yet started to grow. But Phyllis could discern the look and smell of Easter in the keen northern air, would notice the green spikes of the daffodils with only here and there a narrow golden bud—for spring came late to Vyne. They would turn in at the forecourt gates, the dogs leaping up to welcome them as they got out. John’s face above his yellow striped waistcoat would be ruddy and smiling, and Mrs. Campbell would be there too.
But after she had greeted them, Phyllis would rush, not out to the garden, but up the back stairs, closely followed by Lady, to her dear waiting bedroom, and the sweet fresh smell of it after London was not the least of her joys. So it must always have been—its sons and daughters yearning for it when they were away. “Dear Vyne—Sweet Vyne,” they wrote in that crabbed writing Lady Vayne was to risk her eyesight in deciphering. “My dearest Deare,” wrote Richard Vayne, the Member of Parliament, from Charles II’s London to his wife at Vyne, “would that I were at home with thee and the deare brats.” And just so to-day, the Vaynes when in London yearned for their northern home.
Fräulein was playing Wagner’s ‘Fire Music’ in the adjoining schoolroom. Phyllis liked to hear it after she had gone to bed; the sound of the piano was friendly and comforting if, as did not happen often now, her night-fears were upon her.
Slowly and at leisure, she began her bedtime toilet. She liked the mottled blue and white of her jug and basin, simulating marble, but Lettice had a prettier set with a pattern of acorns round the edges. The brown hot-water can always smelt of hot enamel and flakes of it sometimes came off in the water.
She wondered whether Alethea was asleep by now or lying awake joyfully anticipating the morrow. It must be wonderful to be Alethea, but if by some magic they could exchange personalities she knew that she would never do so.
To-morrow she would be moving in a maze of enchantment through the drama dance of Christmas, that drama in which the setting played so great a part. Waking in the twilight of the winter’s morning, waiting for the singing in the courtyard, the herald of the day’s delights. Breakfast and the exchange of small gifts. The visit to her parents’ rooms together with her brothers and sisters to give them their joint offerings. Then the drive down through the white park to the old church—the familiar Christmas service—“And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.” A very short sermon from Mr. Hunt and the lovely Christmas hymns. Home again for luncheon, with the table stretching almost the whole length of the big room. The boar’s head on the sideboard. The joking and fooling in the library. Then out-of-doors for a little exercise, snow-balling perhaps if there was enough snow, then in again to change for tea in the dining-room with lovely iced cakes and crackers. And then the joyous chattering throng climbing the stairs to the Long Gallery.
And there would stand the great shimmering blazing tree, the only light in the room except the fire, and beside it the bran tub, so full that some of the packages were not quite submerged, and beyond the radius of the tree’s light the great long room stretching away into the shadows.
They would begin by drawing out the presents one at a time. “Phyllis, with love from Papa and Mamma.” “Alethea, with love from Uncle Tom and Aunt Evy.” But very soon the tempo would quicken, till they were all pulling them out together. It would seem to go on for ages. And then there was the almost equal delight of examining one’s own and other people’s presents and playing with them, and then the little pause before it was time to get ready for dinner. There seemed no end to the delights, and all the time and independent of all this that strange, indescribable feeling in the air which only came at Christmas. “Oh, Heaven, Heaven!” thought Phyllis, getting ready for bed.
The great shimmering tree
One day (and this was hard to believe) she would be an old woman and would have to die. One hoped at death to go to one’s true home. She was past the stage when one verse in the hymn ‘There’s a Friend for Little Children’ evoked visions of gold crowns kept in the nursery cupboard (“Nana, can I wear my crown this morning?”). But her childish mind could only take in purely anthropomorphic images. Life in heaven must be life at Vyne with all the highspots of delight eternally repeated and prolonged, with all the people she knew and loved around her, and God the Son sometimes coming over the moors to visit them walking on the water.
Phyllis resolved to be up and waiting for the carol singers when they came in the morning. Were they not the herald angels of whom they would afterwards be singing in church, the overture to the Christmas drama, the bringers of the glad tidings of great joy? There was not long to wait now before the drama would begin—the curtain was trembling to its rise. The twilight of the early winter morning, the piercing sweetness of the voices rising in the still air, the tune and the words she loved so well, “Christians, awake, salute the happy morn!”
Then heaven would open.
Epilogue
1946
ONE MISTY DAY OF LATE SUMMER A SMALL MOTOR CAR CONtaining two middle-aged women and a young man drew up outside one of the entrances to Vyne Park.
“I’ll ask the lodge-keeper if we can go through,” said the woman who was driving. “You stay here, Phyllis, it’ll be easier for me than for you.”
She got out and went and spoke to somebody at the open window of the grey stone lodge, then very soon came back and said it was going to be all right.
“We ought, of course, to have gone to the main entrance and up the front drive, but when I told her who we were she said she’d give me the key of the second gate. But she says we must be careful in case we meet another car.”
The lodge-keeper handed them the key as they passed through, and Phyllis looked hard at the woman, but she did not know her face.
She had been visiting her old friend and neighbour of childhood for the first time since the war. Celia was one of the few survivors still clinging on precariously, using every possible device, every lawful expedient to retain their ancient heritage, crippled with taxes, harassed by controls, uncertain how long they could go on or whether after all their children would be able or at liberty to live in their old homes. Nevertheless, and however precarious her hold, Celia was still here, but the Vaynes were gone. Vyne now belonged to the nation.
They went on slowly up the stony, broken drive; the undergrowth had encroached so much it would have been very awkward if they had met anything. This was Wishing Well Wood. There should have been pheasants rising cumbersomely with a clatter of wings, almost ready for the shoot in a few weeks’ time, rabbits too bounding away up the steep hillside, but as they went they saw no sign of life. There wa
s the turning to the quarry, and a little further on should be the clearing with the wishing well. Phyllis looked carefully, but she could not see it; the rhododendrons and bracken must have grown up round the little stone basin and hidden it from view, and the stream after the long dry summer was only a thin trickle.
They came to the second gate, and Robert, Celia’s son, got out and unlocked it. They passed out of the wood into the wild, open country with hills on either side, but the outcrop of rock near the entrance to the wood, the tawny-yellow stone, almost rose-coloured in places, from which the garden front of the house had been built seemed to have vanished also. There were no sheep or deer now to keep the grass close cropped; how tussocky and rough it had become, and surely there were far more rushes! Celia stopped the car just before the steep dip in the road with the two ancient lime trees on either side and they got out and started to walk down the drive. It was very still and the mist hid the more distant hills. Celia complained of the flies bothering her. Then they rounded the bend, and there was the house confronting them across the valley.
It was the view painted on the drop curtain—the great house standing upon its high-buttressed walls, the bright parterre of the Italian garden outspread beneath; the white plume of the fountain in the centre for ever rising and falling, and the sound of it very clear and distinct carried across the intervening valley on the still, windless air.
All this was just as in the old days, and yet there was something strange about the appearance of the house, a subtle difference—but what it was Phyllis could not at once discern. Then as they drew nearer she saw what it was.
The windows were no longer bright and gleaming, but shuttered and opaque; no longer looking out across the valley, they were blind eyes or eyes closed in sleep.
They went on to the foot of the hill and saw that on the flat expanse of ground below the garden the turf had been removed to make a huge car park for the visitors.
They turned aside through the gate into the meadow, where if they mounted to its top they could see the house again on the garden side at the end of the lime avenue. From there it should not look very different from former times. There were pieces of paper in the rank grass in front of the gate. Sometimes in the old days there had been paper lying about after a Bank Holiday when a lot of trippers had come, but never so much as now. How they had resented those trippers, thought Phyllis, and now she was revisiting her old home as a tripper herself. Not for the first time, she felt glad that her parents were no longer alive to see the changes time and a second world war had wrought.
For Sir Thomas the surrender of Vyne to Richard soon after the first war had been no matter for regret; rather the contrary. He could still visit the old place where his son and daughter-in-law now reigned without any feeling of dispossession but only of relief at the lifting of a heavy burden of responsibility. But for Lady Vayne the sacrifice had been great. She had done it in order to save Vyne, for who at that time could foresee a yet more devastating war, one that would completely shatter all remnants of the old order. That her sacrifice should after all have been in vain would have been more than she could bear.
They went on up the steep, stony track which led to the wood at the end of the lime avenue; behind the wood were the moors. Here, too, the grass of the meadow which used to be fine pasture was rough and tussocky and great drifts of thistles spread all over it, their down without a breath of wind to stir it, hanging motionless on the stalks.
Celia was disturbed by the sight of the thistles. “I must speak to Charlie Withinshaw about it,” she said. “He’s more or less in command here, and they shouldn’t be allowed to seed themselves over all the surrounding land.”
Celia, in between her many activities, agricultural, political and social, had converted part of her ancient manor house into a very labour-saving flat for her own use, and as she still had two resident servants, English and properly trained, it was very pleasant staying with her. The rest of the house she and Robert were now proposing to throw open to the public at stated times as an additional source of income. Twice a week through much of the year tours, sometimes conducted by themselves, would go through the mediæval banqueting hall and Minstrels’ Gallery, to view the organ on which Handel had composed a famous work and the manuscript in the master’s own hand.
“We ought to charge two and six a head,” said Robert, “and double for children.” He spoke half in earnest.
They reached the wood and climbed the stile and then were able, as Phyllis had wished, to look back down the long lime avenue to the Palladian garden front of the house. The mist had lifted a trifle, and just over the pediment rose the bare, conical hill and on its summit, crowning it, the famous landmark for miles around, the tall old square tower, the Cage.
They stood in silence for a little while looking at the long façade, tawny-yellow in this light and too far off now to see whether the windows were shuttered or not. Probably they were, but the lawns were as brilliant a green as of old.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” said Celia, “they’re using the chapel again. They have afternoon services for the people who come to see the place. Charlie Withinshaw says there’s quite a large attendance. They’ve done it up and it really looks lovely.”
Here was a strange reversal of fortune. In the last glorious days of sunset (though they had not known it was the sunset) the chapel had been disused and neglected, a mere storehouse for surplus furniture. Now the glory of the house had departed, its motive for existence gone, but the chapel still unscathed, restored and beautified, was fulfilling the purpose for which it had been designed. This tiny grain of comfort seemed symbolical of an immense truth. After a few minutes they turned to go back the way they had come, but Phyllis wanted to go just a little further round the hillside till they could see the open moors at the back, and this they did. There was the familiar sweep of the hills, but no red deer were to be seen.
They walked slowly back down the hill through the gate at the bottom and up the hill again on the other side. Phyllis turned and looked back once more at the familiar view of the house, that view on the drop-curtain which so many artists and she herself had often sketched. Then they passed the two old lime trees and the house was hidden from view. In silence they drove back through Wishing Well Wood until they came to the lodge gate. An elderly man with a weather-beaten face and white hair came to open it for them, and he took the key from Celia.
“Thank you for letting us through,” she said. “You know why we wanted to come, don’t you?”
“Yes, madam, my wife told me. I used to work for Sir Thomas in the old days.”
Phyllis looked at the rugged face, but for the life of her she could not place it.
“I remember Miss Hilda coming to my house for milk when they’d been out on the moors,” he said, “she and another young lady who was staying.”
“Do you remember me?” asked Phyllis.
“Yes, madam, I do.”
He must have come during the first war, thought Phyllis, when they were all busy with hospital and Red Cross work and there were no flower shows or school treats or Christmas trees and no beef distribution on Christmas Eve (the war had finally put a stop to all that), otherwise she must have known him.
“It’s nice to think some of the old people still live here,” she said. “They seem to keep up the gardens well.”
“Yes, madam, but it’s not like the old days; they don’t keep up the park like it used to be. No, it’s not a bit like the old days.”
Phyllis put her hand through the open window of the car and grasped his hand and shook it. She wanted to ask him if there were any more of the old people still living here, but she could not trust herself to say so much. “Goodbye,” she said instead. And it was all she could say.
The other two began talking as they drove on, to give her time to recover, and very soon she did so, but still remained silent, busy with her thoughts.
Strange, dreamlike and unreal the Vyne she had just left had lo
oked: far less real than the one which dwelt in her memory. Was it only the bleakness of the present which made those far-off scenes of childhood appear so joyous, tender and limned with gold? There had been times enough, if she had cared to delve deep into her memory, when even at Vyne she had been bored, discontented and unhappy, resentful of any injustice, chafing under control and critical of her elders and what she considered their failure to take full advantage of favoured circumstance. But for all that those past griefs now meant to her, they might never have been felt.
What, she wondered, had most contributed to the magic of those times, to the Christmas parties especially? The qualities of the people who composed them? Without the people, two or three in particular, there could have been no planning and carrying out of delightful pastimes, no fun and laughter, no delicious fooling. But place those same people in a different environment, and would the enchantment still have held?
Others might think differently, but for her the chief player in those dramas of delight had always been the house. In its fairyland setting, the palace on the edge of the lonely moors, it was the background which enhanced every action of the players—and just as in childhood, so now, as an ageing woman, the place had always seemed to her to be alive, teeming with the spirit poured into it by those who had created it, loved it, lived and died in it. But now it was dead, just as they were dead; it had died when it ceased to be a home.
But just as she believed that somewhere outside the track of time, where past and future merged into an Eternal Present, there was another world, the world of Ultimate Reality, so too she must hope that somewhere in that other world there was a place for Vyne where its spirit still lived together with its creators.
To-morrow she would be returning to London, the post-war London of bus and fish and cigarette queues; of dingy, littered pavements and shabby, paintless houses, of hatless men in pullovers and women with handkerchiefs round their heads and stockingless legs. Some people, and Henry her husband was one, could never grow reconciled to the complete destruction of the civilisation they had known. Nor did they find solace as she did in memories of the past, nor satisfaction in past achievements.
A Country House Christmas Page 9